Talk to the Dead
Ruth Lilly Prize winner Alice Notley on the voice and spirits of her poetry.
Any honest introduction of Alice Notley should acknowledge that you can’t quite introduce her. She has written too much, for too long, in too many different ways, and if any principle explains her work, it’s what she calls “disobedience,” a refusal to comply with any movement or style or idea or identity. In her nearly 30 books from the last 45 years, she has been a New York School poet (second generation) and a feminist poet, an epic and a lyric and a novelistic poet, a playwright and a memoirist, an essayist and an accomplished visual artist: funny, poignant, erudite, and fearless. “Over the years,” she wrote in 2005, “I’ve been variously … formal, experimental, elliptical, polysyllabic, exceedingly plain, personal, and narrative; also speedy and slowed-down; all, it seems to me, in the same general voice.”
True to noncompliant form, she told me recently that she hears less a voice in her poetry now than a number of voices. It was late April, and she was on a trip to New York City, where she learned that she had been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. We discussed the voices in a series of e-mails, which touched on her ambition to give voice to the dead and the silenced, her two forthcoming books, and why she thinks academia is dulling poetry. Our interview has been edited and condensed.
What brings you back to New York City? And how does it feel to be back after having lived abroad, in Paris, for—correct me if I’m wrong—22 years now?
I come back to New York a couple times a year to visit my sons and their families. But this visit I also read at The Poetry Project, something I have done every few years since 1971. It’s familiar to come back—it’s family and friends, it’s the sound of a significant part of my poetry—that New York speed and humor in the street, it’s an important part of my background. I’ve lived in Paris now for 23 years and it’s become home, but I need New York, too.
Are you aware at all when you’re here of discontinuity, too?
Sometimes I think and say aloud that it’s changed—but I’m not really sure it’s that different. The energy’s the same. There are still people who live their lives primarily out on the sidewalk, for example. There are large numbers of immigrants, though of different backgrounds from before; the subway’s still interesting to ride in; there’s a lot of overt artistic activity.
You wrote in your 1995 essay “The ‘Feminine’ Epic” that part of what drew you to write The Descent of Alette, an epic in which the protagonist finds herself on “a subway, endlessly,” was your noticing more and more homeless people in New York in the late 1980s. How, if at all, do you see oppression manifesting itself differently now that the city has so many rich inhabitants? How is it different in Paris?
I’m told that there are homeless people everywhere in New York; I think I would have to stay here longer to know exactly where they are. I’m not aware of people clustered together, as they were in the ’80s, in places like Tompkins Square Park and beneath Grand Central Station. I suppose that means that overt displays of homelessness are discouraged. Paris had a rather large homeless population when I first moved there, and there seem to be a lot of people sleeping over heating grates at the moment. But there’s more dialogue in Europe in general about housing. There are a lot more people in the world than there used to be, and taking care of everyone’s needs seems formidable. I actually don’t think about the rich very much. I’m not interested in them. I suppose I think everyone should exclude them.
Could you speak to your decision not to spend your career in academia, and to why, as you’ve said elsewhere, “Poetry should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy”?
I’ve never seen any connection between poetry and the academy or poetry and the university—or between fiction writing and the university. When I first went to Iowa as a fiction writer, I was appalled to discover I was supposed to learn how to teach. I somehow hadn’t noticed the MFA was a teaching degree. I gradually began writing poetry and got my degree eventually in fiction and poetry both, but I refused to do the student teaching and was given the job of being the dittograph person. I ran off everybody’s handouts for classes. Poetry is itself an ancient art older than any academy or institution. Why should a poet teach poetry or anything else?
Could you talk about specific problems in the poetry world that stem at least in part from the fact that so many practicing poets spend their lives in academia? One issue that occurred to me was the shift in emphasis from musicality to form that you discuss in your essay “American Poetic Music at the Moment.” Perhaps part of the reason poets are more comfortable talking about form than sound is that it’s easier to study.
Oh, everyone’s so boring! They have students! We had these really difficult lives in the midst of which we talked to each other and fought with each other about all of our thoughts about poetry. Everyone thinks they’re a poet because they get degrees. They are taught by boring teachers who validate the fact that they have a certain interest in poetry and then—presto—they get to validate more like themselves. I am using the pronoun “they” in the normal American vernacular way that is born of necessity. So. There are still old-fashioned, silly ways to discuss musicality in the mainstream academy (you say vague things about consonants and vowels), and my work has been subjected to them as well as to the lack of discussion in the avant-garde part of the academy. With musicality no one knows what to say, because it’s practically metaphysical, the essence of the poetry talent—don’t ever mention the poetry talent, either. I am totally musical, and I hear all the words I say in daily life. I have allergies at the moment that are blocking up my normal sounds and making other ones. My speaking voice is echoing about in my brain-bones, and I can’t catch my breath properly.
I love the way you write in your 1999 essay “Voice” about “where in or around the body the poem voice comes from.” “I myself,” you write, “used to hear the voice come from just outside my forehead on the right side; now I’m not sure, different places, something in the mouth or maybe from the eyes.” When I read in one of your recent poems “Poetry touches you with sounds on the back / of your neck,” I shivered. How much does this embodied element of sound change as your projects change? Where do you hear the voice now?
My voice. What I’ve been getting as voice for a few years is more like voices. I am so empty from all the things I’ve been through in my life, and from living in a foreign culture that remains forever foreign, that I am bombarded constantly by other voices when I sit down to write. I kind of don’t have a self now, it’s a rote thing, but I seem to hear what everyone else is saying, particularly the dead. This is quite interesting. The dead have to translate themselves, or be translated by me or into me when they speak, so they are somewhat flat musically. I hear their voices in the front of my head and then somehow translate that into poetry. I’m never sure whether I’m really hearing other voices or am inhabiting my imagination. Sometimes I know for sure a dead person is talking to me, but not always. I am obviously walking some line between charlatanism and authenticity that is scary and satisfying. Some of this work will be published next year in my new book from Penguin, Certain Magical Acts.
That’s fascinating. It calls to mind that wonderful passage from Culture of One (2011): “Why do you always / write about talking to the dead? People talk to the dead, / that’s why.” The passage turns potential accusations of your eccentricity on their head: it’s not that you’re hearing things, more that other people aren’t listening.
This reminds me of your writing, in another context, “My own poetry seems less eccentric than motivated by the urgency of making sound accurate to previously unpoeticized aspects of life.” You’re writing there about “the inclusion in the national poetry of people who might not have been thought to be there,” but I’m curious whether you consider listening to voices of the dead instrumental to that project—as in Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), for example.
I sometimes think that good poets open themselves to all the voices in the air, and they are there, of the live and dead, of animal and plant and inert matter, of whatever inhabits the rest of the universe. And to a vast unconscious or sleeping assemblage of souls. My job has become to interpret the nature of the cosmos as it is presented to me by these voices, but I suspect that “the dead” speak through the voices of any poets that are open to them, the way you can open up when you write a poem and tap words from just anywhere.
But I began writing as a young woman whose voice, or kind of voice, had never before appeared in poems. I invented a voice for myself when there had scarcely been any female poets, and then a voice for myself as a young mother. I allowed my children’s voices in, and then the voices of all my friends, the people on the street, anyone, really, who hadn’t been in the poem before was welcome, to the extent I could hear them. I knew I couldn’t hear everyone, but I tried. By the time I wrote The Descent of Alette I was creating voices for the homeless and oppressed as I encountered them, for my dead brother who had suffered from PTSD, for anyone I felt needed representation in poetry. I feel that poetry is, and is for, everyone. But we are poetry, we are somewhat measurable vibrant bundles of “wave lengths,” moving and perceptually collaged selves perceived as wholes. Anyone is the universe.
View slideshow of Alice Notley's book covers
I’d love to hear more about Certain Magical Acts, too. And I’d be an incompetent interviewer if I didn’t ask more about how and when you came to feel, as you say, empty and selfless.
Certain Magical Acts contains a couple of works for many voices, also a healing ceremony for two characters, a single-voiced found work that is essentially a manuscript speaking, and a novella like a spy novel. I can see myself as a spy for the dead. There are also shorter unique pieces. I have another book coming out this year, from Letter Machine, called Benediction, that is 15 years old and is a rather massive single work. It vibrates all over itself, it just vibrates—I don’t know how else to describe it. But partway through my writing of it my husband, Douglas Oliver, became ill with cancer and, just as I was completing the book, died. So it has been difficult for me to face this poem.
Doug’s death is one of the things that have happened since I moved to Paris. It was followed by my being diagnosed with hepatitis C; I had a very bad case and had to do an 11-month treatment, which was depressing and wearying. However, during the course of the treatment I wrote the book In the Pines, which is something like folk song. I began to feel very empty at this point, but that seems to mean that you become full of some other kind of spirit. I stopped feeling like Alice Notley. The people I talk about in In the Pines are still my friends and relatives, but are unnamed though certainly real. They are pronouns; I am a pronoun. We are the folk. I don’t mind thinking of myself as one of the folk or as a soul.
I’m working on something now that is meant to be collage-like, but in the sense that everyone, all the dead and live, will say what they would like to paste onto it. This is the new universe. We have come around again to a point of reinvention, re-creation of it, all of it.
You’ve written in a number of places about the challenge of inventing a voice for yourself as a woman, such as in the stunning lines “But I’ve / not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be.” But you’ve also written that in the initial process of inventing a voice, you imitated “exclusively men consciously.” Why was this so, do you think? How have sexism and the male domination of national conversations about poetry affected the reception of your work?
I had very few female predecessors. They weren’t there. You can’t become a poet without imitating others, so I imitated men rather than the two and half women, because, by the laws of numbers, more of them were brilliant and worthy of imitation. I’ve never been afraid of being marginalized; I was too obsessed with writing poetry to care about that. Obviously the reception of my work has been hugely affected by the fact that the tradition has been so male. On the other hand, the reception of, say, Ted [Berrigan]’s work was hugely affected by the fact that he was working class. Etc. There are always multiple discriminations going on, layers of them; but poetry is about the writing of it, and we wrote and discussed poetry and lived our eventful lives without worrying that much about how we were received. Poetry always finds its way, according to its own laws.
I very much like the folk element of In the Pines. Bob Dylan, for instance, is all over it. Can you speak a bit to his influence, and to other musicians and types of music that have been important to your work?
I’m not hugely influenced by Dylan, but I do really like certain songs of his, such as “The Man in the Long Black Coat” and “Blind Willie McTell,” the ones I keep referring to in “In the Pines” (the title poem in the book). I’m also influenced by the music he was influenced by and enjoy hearing that in his music. I sat by the console radio when I was five, listening to popular music as well as radio shows with their voices and sound effects. I studied classical piano in high school and college but wasn’t really that good. But I have that ear for something like the rapid piano line in poetry, and I’ve used effects from choral music in my work. I tend to write my long books in sonata form, but unconsciously. And I know I do jazz sometimes, though I try not to. I’m not listening to anything right now, but I sing in the bathtub a lot. I have songs going on in my head all the time, and I’m always trying to change the ongoing song so I won’t go nuts.
Earlier you mentioned the theme of reinvention, beginning again, which has been central to your work. It has the etymological sense of “apocalypse,” of uncovering, which of course calls to mind the catastrophic state of the planet. Could you speak a bit to what connection you see between your emphasis on beginnings and your concern with climate change?”
An “apocalypse” is, strictly speaking, a dream vision. Boethius invented the apocalypse as a form in “The Consolation of Philosophy.” My emphasis on beginnings is slightly different: it’s a way I learned to think after various personal disasters, that you must always be prepared to create the world again. I think we will have to renew from the changes climate change and overpopulation bring—there will be no choice.